FOOTNOTE - OR PERISH
Wiener, Jon
A footnote appears, at first sight a trivial thing, and easily understood. But in the pages of the new Social Sciences Citation Index, these scholarly creations step forth as independent beings,...
...IF CITATION INDEXING becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships, the implications for one's own footnotes are clear...
...The Citation Index can be used to identify fast-rising rookies, players at the peak of their careers, and over-the-hill performers, along with those who peaked too soon...
...4 M. J. Oromaner, "Contemporary American and British Sociology," British Journal of Sociology (1970): 329...
...An author who footnotes sources you consider to be important ought to be consulted, and an article that fails to footnote the important sources probably is not worth reading...
...IN THE MAGAZINES Index-•-three times a year— offers the potential of regularly updated measures of intellectual status...
...The Citation Index's computer data bank is updated weekly...
...What is true of fields is also true of individual articles.8 The Citation Index can provide averages to suggest what the acceptable "half-life" of references ought to be in a genuinely "scientific" work...
...The fastest rising sociologist for this period was Seymour Martin Lipset, who rose from 11th to first...
...But in the pages of the new Social Sciences Citation Index, these scholarly creations step forth as independent beings, endowed with a life of their own...
...From the viewpoint of the citation indexers, this is perfectly kosher...
...2 An article in the British journal Nature claims that "valid correlations can be obtained between individual performance and citation counts...
...Among those who dropped off the list of the top 22 were not only Shils and Sorokin, but Max Weber himself...
...in 1967-68, the top five were Lipset, Parsons, Merton, Etzioni, and Goode...
...The Citation Index will be useful for "efficient management" of "increasingly scarce intellectual and financial resources...
...If a journal 6 Eugene Garfield, "Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation," Science 178 (1972) : 474-75...
...One imagines the eventual establishment of a social science tickler tape, which would spread citation rates to the offices of deans and department chairmen instantaneously...
...In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency...
...The potential of citation indexing for measuring academic status can be seen in a pre-Citation Index study of the American Sociological Review, comparing individuals' citation frequencies for 1958-62 with those for 1967-68 in the same journal.4 The five most often cited sociologists between 1958 and 1962 were, in order, Dutkheim, Parsons, Shils, Sorokin, and Lazarsfeld...
...If I cite myself alone, what am I? And if not in this article, when...
...With this notion in mind, the Citation Index has taken on the herculean task of indexing the footnotes in 3,000 social science journals in 26 languages...
...ALL of these procedures have been practiced with a vengeance by Eugene Garfield, founder and president of the Citation Index's parent firm [and also its publisher: the Institute for Scientific Information, in Philadelphia...
...The five-year cumulation of the sister publication Science Citation Index listed not just authors, but also journals in order of frequency of citation...
...1 "True influence" and "impact" are measured by frequency of citation...
...Those who want their work to be indexed ought to ponder this question with particular care...
...A burst of noise from the ticker...
...as the importance of being footnoted becomes increasingly clear, each author will footnote more people—to gain their friendship and their footnotes in return...
...You look up an author, and the Index refers you to all the articles, published in a given period, which have cited various works of his...
...To paraphrase Rabbi Hillel: if I do not cite myself, who will...
...Indeed, if there is another social scientist among the listed 100,000 with your last name and initials, the Citation Index considers the two of you to be a single person, and intermingles your footnotes indiscriminately...
...Not surprisingly, one percent of the scientific journals received 24 percent of all the references, and six percent of the journals received half the citations...
...If one friend cites you in an indexed journal, you are listed in the Citation Index, and you avoid falling into that terrible 5 Garfield, Nature...
...the dean rushes over and reads off the sputtering tape, `Dan Bell up 6.") The Citation Index can be used not only to see who has the most footnotes of all, but to compare the citation rates of authors of related works to see who has had the greater "impact," whose "contribution" to a particular area has been more "significant...
...if it appears in New Politics, or Social Policy, or Dissent, you don't...
...he might demand that his publisher advertise more, or bring out a cheaper paperback edition, to get more books in the hands of potential footnoters...
...for all the computer knows, another person with your name is citing you...
...it is not...
...The most likely consequence will be an inflation of citations...
...Sociologists of science who study citation patterns have concluded that it is more scientific to footnote recent works than older ones...
...One must remember that the median citation rate is around one footnote per scholar every four months...
...In fact, a small number of scholars are cited hundreds of times a year, while the majority are cited once per issue...
...Current Contents is in some ways the boldest of all the related publications...
...ALL THIS may seem fanciful...
...In a four-month period, the average social scientist (of the 100,000 who are footnoted) has 1.2 articles cited, and he is cited on the average 1.7 times...
...No one punches their footnotes into IBM cards...
...590 class of the never-cited...
...Perhaps, as president of the firm that publishes the Index, Garfield is entitled to take these liberties...
...If a footnote to your work appears in Commentary or the Public Interest, you get counted...
...The "Automatic Subject Citation Alert" is an "individualized, computer-produced, weekly alerting service" which will send you the latest footnotes every week from 3,200 journals on a topic of your choice...
...For an individual to move from, say, the 85,274th most often cited social scientist in May, to the 67,319th in December, would be an indication of intellectual growth and increasing status, a reason to go out to dinner, if not to ask for a promotion...
...a graphical approximation of the history of that subject.9 The computer will do this by tracing citations back into the past...
...The simplest method by which editors can keep their journal's citation rates high is to make sure each article in their journal footnotes other articles in earlier issues of the same journal...
...Presumably there is a Babe Ruth of lifetime citations (Talcott Parsons...
...We can tell that physics is more scientific than sociology because 50 percent of cited physics articles in a recent journalyear were less that three years old, while 50 percent of sociology footnotes were more than six years old...
...therefore Marx's work did not influence Parsons...
...See also N. C. Janke, Kenneth O. May, "Abuses of Citation Indexing," Science 156 (1967) : 890-92...
...ominously, this finding was reported in the IEEE Transactions on Military Electronics...
...Even if a footnote is not altogether appropriate, someone may still be led to read your article as a result of finding its footnotes in the Citation Index...
...That's a self-citation rate of 79 percent...
...As the publicity brochure explains, "no human indexer has to decide what is the subject of an article...
...administration...
...Talcott Parsons footnotes Durkheim and Weber...
...Of course almost everyone is cited once or twice, so it is only at the top that real distinctions could be made...
...Increasingly they will become the arbiters of what is a legitimate footnote and what is simply an attempt to advance a friend's work, improve one's own citation rate, or draw the attention of users of the Citation Index...
...In fact, the editors of the Citation Index made some curious choices about which journals to index and which to exclude...
...To the question, "If I cite myself alone, what am I?" a sociologist of science has answered, "parochial, eccentric, mediocre...
...and not to be cited at all, death...
...This is not a substitute for friends' citations, it is merely a way of boosting your rate...
...The publishers of the Citation Index offer a wide range of other "information services...
...Of the ten most often cited sociologists in 1958-62, only four remained in the top ten six years later...
...IN THE MAGAZINES isn't footnoted often, it's not "useful to the scientific community...
...the more often you are footnoted, the greater your intellectual contribution, the more valuable your scholarly work...
...that the number of citations provides the best available measure of the "value" of an author's work, that the "best" contributions are among those cited most, and the "least important" attract few, if any, citations, and that an author's "outstanding" work is the one that is cited most often...
...Half of all articles footnoted at least one of the 25 most frequently cited journals at least once.6 The same conclusion has been drawn about journals as about individual scholars: in the words of the leading advocate of citation indexing, "citation frequency reflects a journal's value...
...no computer data bank contains the references in their work...
...The easiest way to avoid the dustbin of the uncited is to cite oneself...
...and the academic world is waiting for the Hank Aaron who will challenge him (Seymour Martin Lipset...
...The Index lists something like 175,000 citations of 125,000 articles by 100,000 social scientists, and it does this every four months...
...thus the more footnotes you have, the more people using the Citation Index are likely to come up with a reference to your article...
...If a young social scientist is footnoted often, his work will be judged important and valuable by his superiors, and he will be promoted...
...Among the 3,200 indexed journals, selective coverage is given to such unlikely titles as Mosquito News, Soap/Cosmetics, Digestion, and the Tasmanian Journal of Agriculture, but there is no coverage at all of journals like the Review of Radical Political Economy, Radical America, Socialist Revolution, Telos, Insurgent Sociologist, Working Papers for a New Society, or Monthly Review, to name a few...
...Could it be that there is some logic behind these choices of the editors...
...of the 19 references to Garfield's corpus, 15 come from himself...
...The name Karl Marx does not appear among the 22 most frequently cited scholars for either period...
...Of the 3,000 journals whose footnotes are indexed, 1,000 receive "full coverage"—every footnote to a different source is punched into an IBM card, fed into the computer, and published in the next issue of the Index...
...if no one footnotes somebody's work, that will be an argument for firing him...
...However, it is undesirable if the only citations to your work come from yourself...
...It is possible to rank-order all 100,000 social scientists three times a year...
...3 Garfield, Nature...
...J. Margolis, "Citation Indexing and Evaluation of Scientific Papers," Science 156 (1967) : 1213...
...One should therefore be judicious in his footnoting: footnote friends and don't footnote enemies...
...To assist librarians in this task, the creators of the Citation Index also publish Journal Citation Reports, listing citations by journal instead of author...
...For instance, if we consider theorists of comparative modernization, we find that Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies was cited in 16 different articles in four months of 1973, Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy got ten, and Cyril Black's Dynamics of Modernization got only four...
...3 Such a claim may send a chill down the spines of assistant professors...
...It is dedicated to the proposition that the best way to find out what an article is about is not to look at its title, but at its footnotes...
...it is a weekly journal which consists solely of reproductions of the tables of contents of "the important journals...
...Dissemination of weekly changes in citation frequency rates and rankings could provide an extremely sensitive measure of intellectual status...
...Editors thus need to be concerned about the citation rate of their own journals, and ought to seek to avoid the downward spiral of a decreasing citation rate bringing about a decline among library subscriptions...
...For those scholars at the low end of the citation frequency lists, this experience could be depressing: to be informed every week, month s Garfield, Nature...
...5 To further such use in the sciences, the Science Citation Index plans to rank the 20,000 most cited papers each year, and has listed the 50 most often cited authors in rank order each year...
...You could, for instance, receive weekly listings of all articles in the 3,200 indexed journals which footnoted you...
...The author of a new article indexes his own work through his references...
...mental depression...
...The publishers of the Citation Index believe it can indicate "how each brick in the edifice of science is linked to all the others...
...The frequency of publication of the Citation 2 Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole, "The Ortega Hypothesis," Science 178 (1972) : 36970...
...The key is not just adding more footnotes to your articles, but adding wide-ranging footnotes that may be only tenuously related to your topic...
...The computer could easily list authors in order of the number of their citations every four months...
...Thus one should definitely footnote his friends (once in an article is all that counts), and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return (send them offprints, suggest relevant references to your work, etc...
...presumably, editors of social science journals should look suspiciously on articles submitted for publication whose footnotes are primarily to works more than seven or eight years old...
...The Index lists 21 articles written by Garfield, which were referred to a total of 19 times in the indexed journals in four months of 1973...
...These implications for altering one's own footnoting practices have further implications fcr journal editors and referees...
...to be cited most, bliss...
...Black need not despair...
...Every article of yours ought to cite your other published works—once is enough for each...
...7 He suggests that frequency of citation should be the basis of library subscriptions...
...it will rewrite the intellectual history of social science, and the rewriting will be done by a computer...
...Fully 15 of the 22 most often cited sociologists in 1967-68 were not on the list for 1958-62...
...Editors would thus want to suggest the addition of appropriate footnotes in articles accepted for publication, or perhaps reject articles whose footnotes do not contribute to the citation rate, and thus survival, of the journal...
...Predictably, Parsons was the only one to remain at the top of the list for both periods...
...Citation indexing has more far-reaching implications for journal editors...
...the sister publication Science Citation Index already lists the top 50 scientists each year in order of citation frequency...
...To the extent that the Citation Index becomes an accepted measure of scholarly importance, it will play a role in promotion and tenure of college and university staff, alongside the more traditional methods of evaluation...
...Those submitting articles might seek to avoid criticism of their footnotes with a few judicious citations of works by the editors of the journal in question...
...simply insisting that his own graduate students footnote him more often could raise his citation rate considerably...
...This makes often cited social scientists something like professional athletes— citations are like home runs, citation rates like batting averages...
...In a year, it indexes around half a million footnotes from 80,000 articles...
...The other 2,000 journals receive "selective coverage" of the appropriately socialscientific articles they publish...
...therefore he was influenced by Durkheim and Weber...
...Durkheim also took a big fall, from first to 15th...
...The computer console thus will dispense with such arguments as Alvin Gouldner's, that Parsons can only be understood as an attempt to come up with a conservative alternative to Marxism during a time of capitalist crisis...
...The Citation Index is intended not only to provide a quantitative basis for firing or pro moting you, but also to refer people to your work...
...As one citation authority has written, "it was a logical step" to use the Citation Index to "measure current performance of scholars...
...The average number of citations per author will creep up, and the standards will have to be revised to reflect the new footnoting practices...
...Potential readers, using the Citation Index, are led to your published work by your footnotes...
...a Duncan McRae, Jr., "Growth and Decay Curves in Scientific Citations," American Sociological Re4 t1QIQ1- f1 (.2d In the near future a historian or sociometrist will be able to sit before a computer console and specify some starting point—a person, a word, a citation...
...The Citation Index thus "breaks the subject index barrier...
...Close inspection of his citations reveals the following: of Garfield's 21 articles, 13 are cited only by himself...
...Publishers of the Citation Index have suggested a further use for their product: citation frequencies should be the basis of awarding prizes, grants, and fellowships...
...This has further implications for the IN THE MAGAZINES structure of one's own footnotes...
...The year-by-year pattern of citations provides a concrete quantitative measure of an individual's intellectual development: Professor X started his rise in '63, hit his peak in '70 with his most often cited work, and has been resting on his laurels ever since, having the same old articles cited, and slowly sliding downhill in the rankings...
...To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes: to be cited regularly, is felicity...
...It will be up to journal editors to permit, or to eliminate, such footnotes...
...It is a characteristic of science, we are told, that "new contributions will supersede old ones," and this "should be observable in the distribution of footnote citations...
...This puts Garfield high in the citation frequency rankings—higher than Robert Merton or Daniel Bell, for instance...
...The Citation Index is the most recent, and most titanic, achievement of the burgeoning information storage and retrieval industry...
...The computer will respond by drawing or displaying a historical road map which will show...
...The purpose of the Citation Index, according to its advocates, is not only to serve as a reference tool, but also to "identify" the scholars "who have had a major impact on their fields," those "who have truly influenced the course of science...
...citation frequency "provides a solid basis for cost-benefit analysis in the management of subscription budgets...
...what is this "performance" that military electronics experts have tied to our footnotes...
...to footnote an author is to cast a vote for his tenure or grant...
...Intellectual styles are reflected in the patterns of citations: some authors are cited at a slow and steady pace, while others alternate flashy peaks with long troughs of inactivity (teaching...
...one would have to conclude that his work had little "impact" on sociology, that it lacked "quality," and that it is not among the "best contributions" to the field...
...after month, that no one cited you this week...
...Parsons does not footnote Marx...
...And, of his 21 articles, nine were published in Current Contents, of which Garfield himself is founder, publisher, and editor...
...The Citation Index's creators also believe the Index can help editors select articles for publication by providing standards to determine what constitutes up-to-date footnotes...
...For this intellectual breakthrough, it received the first "Information Hall of Fame Award...
...But there is one group of social science writers and editors that need not concern themselves with any of the foregoing: those whose published work appears beyond the pale of the indexed journals...
...7 Garfield, Science...
...The prestigious journal Science has run a series of articles arguing that the "quality of scientific output" of an author can be accurately measured by the numer of citations he receives, ' Eugene Garfield, "Citation Indexing for Studying Science," Nature 227 (1970) : 669-71...
...it's not worth reading, and thus not worth a library subscription— which will make certain that even fewer read the more obscure journals...
Vol. 21 • September 1974 • No. 4
